Optimal Consensus Time Synchronizations for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have received an important consideration in recent years regarding its broad area of applications. Time synchronization is one of the most important challenges of WSNs. This paper proposes a novel Optimal Distributed Consensus Time Synchronization (O-DCTS) for WSN. The proposed O-DCTS is based on some known distributed algorithms such as consensus with averaging and graph theory features. The algorithm, iteratively, updates the skew and the offset parameters of each sensor node's virtual clock. The skew compensation parameters and the offset compensation parameters are employed to update the virtual clock of each sensor node. The optimization of the proposed algorithm is applied on these two parameters, skew and offset, with respect to a minimization criterion. The convergence of the O-DCTS is studied using distance regular graphs.